The current most common way to dispose of waste is by use of a landfill. Landfill operators attempt to make sanitary landfills by filling a land area with successive layers of solid waste, principally household waste, and layers of earth or soil are well known. The uncontrolled landfill depends upon natural biological action, precipitation and climate to effect decomposition. As the waste decomposes, toxic materials in the waste may enter into the natural precipitation draining out of the landfill, thereby allowing highly toxic contaminated water to potentially contaminate underground water supplies, surface streams and wells. Due to the very slow stabilization, the uncontrolled landfill is not usable for other purposes for long periods of time and thus, particularly near metropolitan areas, represents a large waste of land resources.
Despite efforts to recycle materials in the waste, certain types of waste are difficult to recycle by use of the current standard methods.
For instance, electronic waste, otherwise known as e-scrap and e-waste, is trash generated from surplus, broken, and obsolete electronic devices. E-waste is prolific and toxic. It is well researched that only approximately 13% of e-waste is processed for materials recovery. In addition, e-waste volumes are increasing at a compounding 8% per annum. As such, landfills are usually not a permitted option due to long term leaching of heavy metals.
When disposed in landfills, e-waste contributes approximately 70% of the overall hazardous waste components despite by volume being a relatively small fraction of materials placed in the landfills. Further, e-waste equates to a material percentage of metals and minerals mined annually. For example, e-waste gold content equates to approximately 10% of the gold mined annually. Disposal of e-waste without the recovery of minerals and metals is inefficient and unsustainable long term. E-waste can also be particularly detrimental to the environment since such waste includes harmful lead compounds, mercury, cadmium, chromium, and chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases. Thus, the hazardous content of e-waste requires special management.
In years past, finding efficient and effective ways of disposing of such waste has been, and continues to be a challenge. For instance, incineration has not been a viable option due to nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur oxides (SOx), acidity, arsenic, and heavy metals and other toxins that have detrimental effects on the atmosphere.
Most other solutions require manual deconstruction of feedstock, and are labor intensive. In addition, typical extraction of previous metals use high temperature refining methods, which produce emissions that require scrubber systems and high levels of energy. Other alternatives tend to require large-scale operations that are centralized and logistically less efficient. Moreover, other processes are per gram of metals recovered are more expensive to build and to operate. In addition, other developments of hydro digesters take a small percentage of electronic waste, such as ground up printed circuit boards and dissolve them. Further, post processing disposal of toxic residue concentrates is then required (i.e., hydrocarbon, flame-retardants, and other residues).
However, a majority of electronic products usually end up in landfills, and just a small percentage come back to be used in new electronic devices. In addition, recycling e-waste can be challenging because certain electronics are sophisticated devices manufactured from varying proportions of glass, metals, and plastics. Electronic devices generally contain valuable materials including copper, tin, iron, aluminum, palladium, titanium, gold, and silver. Therefore, there is a need to be able to find effective and safe ways to recover, reuse, and recycle such materials. This may be especially true when considering that recycling e-waste can help save energy and resources, reduce pollution, conserve landfill space, and ultimately provide environmentally safe methods of processing e-waste. There is also a need for smaller scale easy to deploy processing at the core of efficient e-waste processing.
Like e-waste, medical waste such as needles, syringes, glassware, and bandages, also has challenges in disposal. Current medical waste systems do not sanitize, sort or recycle the medical waste. Given that certain bacteria and viruses can be transmitted via biologically contaminated waste, care should be taken to destroy pathogens and thus minimize possible pathogen transmission. Instead, biologically contaminated medical waste is often disposed in landfills, which can be detrimental to the environment.
Current systems of disposing of medical waste include use of on-site incinerators. Incinerators may be effective in decontaminating and reducing the size of the medical waste materials, but are not satisfactory because they often have the danger of toxic gas emissions. In addition, on-site incinerators in large hospitals cannot be outfitted with adequate pollution control devices and run by highly trained technicians on a financially feasible basis. As a consequence, these incinerators may operate at pollution levels in excess of the legal limit or be run by less than adequately trained technicians. Other methods include use of disinfectant solutions, which can take up a large amount of space and risk contaminating the operator.
In all cases, the operators must remove the medical waste from its waste container, which is a rigid, container used by medical professionals to protect others from the pathogens residing on the medical waste. This process can be labor intensive, and expose the operators to the sharp objects contained within, such as needles and broken glass, and expose the operators to the pathogens contained within, including liquid and solid materials. There, therefore, is also a need for a system to process medical waste in a way that minimizes manual labor, destroys and disinfects medical waste products, while minimizing contact of the medical waste to the operator of the medical waste disposal system. It may also be desirable to recover metals and other materials from such medical waste, which current systems fail to address in any way.
For these, among other reasons, the inventors developed the currently presented system. Certain embodiments of present invention provide a system to effectively and safely process waste, such as e-waste, medical waste, and other types of waste, to recover, reuse, and recycle such materials. As a result, it may be possible to reduce pollution, conserve landfill space, and provide environmentally safe methods of processing and recycling waste materials.
Additional features, advantages, and embodiments of the invention are set forth or apparent from consideration of the following detailed description, drawings and claims. Moreover, it is to be understood that both the foregoing summary of the invention and the following detailed description are exemplary and intended to provide further explanation without limiting the scope of the invention as claimed.